2015 Deathscapes Aff



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Neoliberalism created these education policies to maintain the white supremacist order – we now have this police-state playpen of rigorous surveillance and criminal sanction to control and isolate poor students of color in order to protect the desirable and productive classes


Rose 2015, [E. (2015). Deathscapes in Neoliberal Times: Prisonfare, Workfare and Resistance as Potential Outcomes for Black Youth.//KHS]

With all of this being said, this chapter will argue that the consequences of a rising neoliberal paternalism and the structural formation of a reconfigured racism has shaped the schooling of low-income urban black youth for the worst. In education, “children of Color and their communities do not author the policies that shape there schooling. Rather, they are characters written into a subplot by the dominant authors, who can rewrite their intentions at will” (Vaught, 2011, p. 64). Black people and their communities have little or no recourse because their children were incidental objects of education policy shaped by white actors for the maintenance of the white supremacist social order. Education in urban schools filled with low-income black youth is now practicing poverty control responsibilities. The question is why? The how question is the easy part, but linking structural and ideological elements to micro practices of poverty containment in both social and penal policy is quite the task. In the chapter I will attempt to unpack this modern phenomenon. But first I will offer a quick overview to this chapter and the paper at large as to why students are now being domesticated as criminals, low-wage laborers or zombies: 1) neoliberal governance provides the back drop to zero tolerance polices, the securitization of urban schools, the privatization, deregulation and marketizing of public education in this country, 2) larger changes in the global economy has repurposed and radically restructured the entire educational system to operate in a different form of capital accumulation in the community economy, 3) schools in low-income communities of color are used as a means to control its population in a police-state like existence with its mechanisms of hypersurveillance, which serves to control, contain, and isolate poor people of color, 4) poverty management and control leads to hyper-surveillance instruments in schools and residential areas that are used to protect middle/upper class students and homes from dangers outside of its borders and to contain poor students and residents of color from venturing outside of the predetermined geographic spaces, 5) teachers in low-income urban schools preform different functions than teachers that educate middle-class students and in turn perceive low-income students differently before they even enter the classroom, 6) agreeing with Brown’s (2015) interpretation of Wacquant's analysis of neoliberalism, she argues that in the wake of industrialization, a new permanent form of structural unemployment “intensified race-class polarization”, whereby, the state apparatus has reconfigured by “unifying social and penal politics into two strands of poverty policy workfare and prisonfare” (p. 399), 7) we are now witnessing a shift in resource allocation from social services managed by the state and wrap-around services by the school to police and operations that manage bodies through military and penal practices and techniques, thus representing a strong relationship between the increase in military and penal expenditures and decreasing traditional social welfare and rehabilitation expenditures6 , 8) as a consequence now schools in which poor students of color attend are often used as “storage facilities” or “warehouses” to contain “disposable youth” (Giroux, 2013) who are viewed as “waste products of a society that no longer considers them any value for labor extraction as the new global economy needs their labor. Many of these youth are pushed out of schools, denied job training opportunities, and subjected to rigorous modes of surveillance and criminal sanctions (location 1370). Now more then ever as youth are now viewed as a liability and not a social investment because of this 9) the prison makes some use of this otherwise unproductive waste, but other that, most students will live their terminal existence as a redundancy (Giroux, 2008) in our racial, social and economic caste system living in temporal realm of “deathscapes.” Deathscapes requires the state to subject humans to inhumane forms of existence. It was told to me by a colleague that both workfare and prisonfare are the living example of a social death, a sanction by the actors who practice and profit from exploitative capitalism and racism.

Eyes forward, feet on the ground, hands on the desk, be docile, submit to authority - The education system functions as a means to recreate the race and class divides of modern capitalism—the schooling system operates as a self-fulfilling prophecy that remaps societal expectations onto America’s youth


Rose 2015, [E. (2015). Deathscapes in Neoliberal Times: Prisonfare, Workfare and Resistance as Potential Outcomes for Black Youth.//KHS]

The political-economy model of reproduction has exerted the strongest influences on radical theories of schooling (Giroux, 2006). Developed primarily around the work of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, it has had a major influence on theories about “the hidden curriculum, educational policies studies and a wide range of ethnographic research” (Giroux, 2006, p. 8). At the core of the political-economic approach are two fundamentally important questions that focus on the relationship between schooling and society, as argued by Giroux (2006); 1) ”How does the educational system function within society?” (p.8) And 2) “How do schools fundamentally influence the ideologies, personalities and needs of the students?” (p. 8). While theorists who work within this model provide different answers, they agree frequently on the relationship between power and domination on the one hand, and the relationship between schooling and the economy on the other (Bowles and Gintis, 2011; Giroux, 2006; Saltman, 2014, 2015). Power, in these accounts, as defined by Giroux (2006), is examined primarily in the terms of its functions to mediate and legitimate the relations of dominance and subordinance in the economic sphere. For political-economist, power becomes the property of dominant groups and operates to reproduce class, gender, and racial inequalities that “functions in the interest of the accumulation and expansion of capital” (Giroux, 2006, p. 8). This becomes clearer in the way as economic-reproductive theorist analyze the relations between economy and schooling. Central to the economic-reproductive position is the notion that schools can only be understood while analyzing the structural effects of the work place and linked to the correspondence principle developed by Bowles and Gintis. Bowles and Gintis (2011) will be 69 quoted at length as they describe the correspondence between education, and the hierarchical division of labor with the end result being the adjusting of young people to a set of social relationships similar to those of the work place : As we have seen the lowest levels in the hierarchy of the enterprise emphasize rule-following, middle levels, dependability, and the capacity to operate without direct and continuous supervision while the higher levels stress the internalization of the norms of the enterprise. Similarly, in education, lower levels ( junior and senior high school) tend to severely limit and channel the activities of students. Somewhat higher, up the educational ladder, teacher and community colleges allow for activity that is more independent and less over all supervision. At the top the elite four year colleges emphasize social relationships conformable with the higher levels in the production hierarchy...As they ‘master’ one type of behavioral regulation, they are allowed to progress to either the next or channeled into the corresponding level in the hierarchy of production. Even within a single school, the social relationships of different tracks tend to conform to different behavioral norms. Vocational and general tracks emphasize rule-following and close supervision, while the college track tends towards a more open atmosphere emphasizing the internalization of norms (p. 132). The relationship between the lowest level of occupational structure and the schooling processes for students who attend these schools situate their desires and aspirations a conformist mindset in order to accept rules of those higher up the ladder. Those of the upper-level have to internalize the enterprise and manipulate others to accept their position in the hierarchy. This difference in the social relationships among and within school in part reflects both the social backgrounds of the student body and their likely future economic positions. Thus blacks and other minorities are concentrated in schools whose repressive, arbitrary, and generally chaotic internal order, coercive authority structure and minimal possibilities for advancement mirror the characteristics of inferior job situations (Anyon, 1980; Bowles and Gintis, 2011; Brown, 2005; Noguera, 2008; Saltman, 2014, 2015; Wacquant, 2001). Similarly, predominantly working-class schools tend to emphasize behavioral control and rule-following, while schools in the well to do suburbs employ relatively open systems that favor greater student participation, “less direct supervision, more student electives, and in general, a value system stressing internalized standards of control” (Bowles and Gintis, 2011, p. 132). Working class schools in both white and black working-class communities are subject to punitive, rigid, disciplinary reforms that for Saltman (2015) “is designed to instill in students submission to hierarchical control,” (p. 228) which occurs through the daily pedagogical practices of “scripted lessons, direct instruction, strict bodily codes demanding students keep their feet on the floor and their hands on the desk and eyes on the teacher” (p. 228). The overall agenda aims to make docile disciplined subjects who will submit to authority of the teacher to later submit to the authority of the boss. As the new service economy produces more and more flexible, precarious, low-wage, low-skill labor, working-class students like their parents before them were conditioned and prepared at an early age to consent to free-market rule and embrace its ideologies by accepting worsening work conditions in a deregulated globalized economy. In this view, the underlying experience and relations of schooling are hyper-(re)animated by the power of capital to provide different skills, attitudes and values to students of different classes, races and gender (Giroux, 2006). In effect, schools mirror not only the social division of labor but also the wider society’s class structure. What is important to remember, as articulated by Bowles and Gintis (2011), is the differential socialization pattern of schools attended by students of different social classes do not arise by accident, as the economy can only be ongoingly recreated in this view if workers learn to take their place and play their role in the production process (Bowles and Gintis, 2011). Rather, the pattern reflects the fact that the educational “objectives and expectation of administrators, teachers and parents differ for students of different social classes”(p. 132). This leads to a more harmonious reproduction of the class structure by arguing that in the day to day operation of the schools as illustrated by Bowles and Gintis (2011): 1) the working class parents favor more structured education methods which is not only a reflection of their own work experiences of demonstrating submission to authority as an essential ingredient in order to get a stable well paying job, 2) the professional parents “prefer a more open atmosphere and a greater emphasis on motivational control” p. 133) that is similarly a reflection of their position in the social division of labor, and 3) the higher-status parents are more likely than their lower-status neighbors to choose open classroom for their children for the justification that this allows for the development of capacity for sustained student work and other characteristics required for adequate job performance in the upper-levels of the occupational hierarchy. The harmonious social relations come in the production of parents who value particular schooling pedagogies that reflect their work and the expectations that their children will take their place in the labor, social and economic hierarchy. This is embedded within a larger nexus of ideological absorption by the poor, working and middle-class communities. The ruling class domination, of the cultural and knowledge apparatuses in our society (Bourdieu and Passerson, 1977) persuades the masses that the unequal sorting and sifting that a society does is a “matter of either merit or natural talent,” (Saltman, 2015, p. 228) thereby shifting the blame from 72 structures and institutions to individuals behaviors and particular groups of peoples’ cultural norms and beliefs systems (Bourdieu and Passerson, 1977; Bowles and Gintis, 2011; Saltman, 2015). Bowles and Gintis (2011) debunks this myth of meritocracy by arguing empirically that the determinant of students future wealth and income is a students class position and family wealth and income rather than either intelligence or amount of schooling. This main insight into our schooling system offered by reproduction theory in America with regard to the relationship between schooling and poverty have largely been ignored by both Liberals and Conservatives (Saltman, 2015). Rather than recognize the extent to which schooling has been and continue to be implicated in the recreation of the class and racial hierarchy across the political spectrum. Politicians and teacher experts’ alike make a simple yet false connection that more schooling not only leads to greater inclusion into the capitalist economy (especially for at-risk students, lowincome students and minorities) but is vital to making society more egalitarian by providing everyone with equal opportunities (Saltman, 2014, 2015). Matter of fact, education seems to stabilize society by reproducing its inequality throughout generations, not disrupting inequality.

Now into the classroom, the teacher sees the dark students: animals, troublemakers, wastes of time and resources. Merely miniature versions of their monstrous black fathers out there on the streets. It is too late to save them - the teacher has already given up on those marked for social death


Rose 2015, [E. (2015). Deathscapes in Neoliberal Times: Prisonfare, Workfare and Resistance as Potential Outcomes for Black Youth.//KHS]

School’s for the students in the 21st century throughout the United States most frequently punish the students who have the greatest academic, social, economic, and emotional needs (Brown, 2015; Giroux 2008, 2013; Lipman, 2011, Kupchik and Ward, 2011; Noguera, 2008; Nolan, 2011). A through examination of which students are most likely to be suspended, expelled or removed from the classroom for punishment, reveals that minorities (especially black and Latino) males, and low achievers are vastly overrepresented (Brown, 2015; Ferguson, 2000; Ferguson; Giroux 2008, 2013; Lipman, 2011, Kupchik and Ward, 2011; Noguera, 2008; Nolan, 2011; Vaught, 2011; Simon, 2007). The enactment of zero-tolerance policies related to discipline in school districts has contributed to a significant increase in the number of children who are being suspended and expelled from schools (Brown, 2015; Giroux,2008, 2013; Kupchik and Ward, 2011; Noguera, 2008; Nolan, 2011; Vaught, 2011; Simon, 2007). This section explains why this has occurred. In the preachment of educational inequality, schools have become implicated in the broader criminalization of youth (Brown, 2005, 2015; Hirschfield , 2008; Krueger, 2010; Means, 2013, Noguera, 2008; Nolan 2009, 2011). With the waning of social democratic policy and the emergence of neoliberal governance, social commitments to schools and to youth have evaporated at the bottom of the race and class structure, while the state has broadly expanded various punitive forms of social control (Brown, 2005, 2015; Means, 2013, Nolan, 2011). In the post-Columbine and post-9/ 11 contexts, public schools have broadly experimented with new systems of risk management, security, and surveillance that are rooted in the symbolic and material practices of the criminal justice system (Simon, 2007). However, while all schools have to some degree experienced heightened security arrangements over the last ten years, these practices have been much more prevalent and intensive in urban public schools serving high concentrations of low-income minority students (Kupchik and Ward, 2011). Next, Patricia Krueger (2010) argue that schools with large populations of students of color are much more likely to lock their doors during the school day. The justification for these preemptive security measures situates youth in urban schools as inherently misbehaving and of need of intensified discipline and control. In schools where the majority of their students are low-income, she found an increasing reliance on punitive school safety practices. These messages are both subtle and overt: When the learning environment of students who are mostly punished for noncriminal behavior are increasingly turned into prison-like spaces, then the combined effects of discriminatory treatment, systemic and institutionalized racism are particularly devastating for low-income youth and students of color. In this current economic production of ‘prison nation’ (Herivel and Wright 2003) schools increasingly feed the U.S. prison system with socially undesired populations to warehouse them as low-wage and exploitable workers (Krueger, 2010, p. 395). Krueger (2010) does an excellent job of linking the neoliberal punitive state and its incorporation of the prison the micro processes of school safety measures and systemic and institutionalized racism for the summation to produce a prison nation. To farther develop a connection of two seemly dissimilar social phenomenon’s Krueger (2010) argues “school lockdowns and hallway enclosures parallel an ideological mode of space production that creates physical enclaves to disproportionately exclude poor youth and students of color who increasingly experience ‘massive exclusion from the formal economy’” (p. 395). Therefore, through the analysis of Krueger, we grasp the problematic relationship between these students uselessness in our post-industrial economy to their exclusion from our formal educational system. Schools are incorporating poverty control mechanisms and prison control techniques as urban youth are positioned in our society either “endangered” or “dangerous,” (Ferguson, 2000). While arguments on social problems are increasingly framed in terms of supposed criminal pathologies of young black people (Giroux 2013; (Means, 2013; Ferguson, 2000). What situates these morphed modes of oppressive operations in is the era of racially targeted “law and order” policies and their racially skewed mass imprisonment (Wacquant, 2001), in the reigning public image of the criminal that is not just inherently different from us and yourself but a black monster of young African American men from the intercity (Wacquant, 2001). African American men have come to personify the explosive mix of moral degeneracy and mayhem (Wacquant, 2001). Black males are represented in our society as criminal (Ferguson, 2000; Monroe, 2005; Page, 1997; Wacquant, 2002), and “at risk” academically (Noguera, 2008). This occurs through media representations by journalist, Hollywood portrayals of inner city black youth as cultural different, or deficient, scholarly research, and public discourses about urban life centered on race and criminality (Ferguson, 2000; Monroe, 2005; Page, 1997). Black males are also portrayed in the media as “incompetents of a violent nature,”(Page, 1997, p. 100) as “black males are featured in media images that seems to threaten the body politic” (p. 100), they are consistently depicted as “unembraceable,” this leads the public to justify “costly prisons, instead of homes for the homeless (p. 100). The target behind “the media constructions of the utterly violent black male criminal”(p. 100) are the youth who reside in low-income communities, and their parents. These citizens are perceived in the same negative light by both middle-class blacks and whites as dangerous with criminal pathologies (Wacquant, 2001). Middle-class citizens view these communities and their students as dangerous and worth avoiding at all cost. In supporting this line of thought, Hirschfield (2008) states, “in short, the gated community may be a more apt metaphor to describe the security transformation of affluent schools, while the prison metaphor better suits that of inner-city schools” (p. 84). Moreover, because education is a part of social welfare programs that has experienced drastic budget cuts under a neoliberal governmentality, teachers now have to write off students that are “un-deserving (Ferguson, 2000) for the logic being limited resources invested in failing students is counter productive. It should come to no surprise that teachers view their black boys in a negative and often destructive light. Schools serve as sites for the reproduction of these negative racial representations of black boys by the practices of their teachers and administrators (Ferguson, 2000; Morris, 2007). One factor in the treatment of poor inner-city youth as prison inmates hinges on the proposition that their teachers see these students as unsalvageable (Ferguson, 2000). Implicit in this mode of thinking rest two recognizable structural realities that both administrators and teachers are consciously aware of: 1) That prison looms over the future of African American youth who fail in school 2) Schools have to sacrifice students who are troublesome to teach those who are more deserving or promising because of the lack of resources (Ferguson, 2000; Hirschfield, 2008). Research conducted by Fine et al., (1992) in California find that many students in impoverished schools believe that educators perceive them as “animals,” “inmates,” “or killers” (as cited in Hirschfield, 2008). Moreover, “black males and females are less than half as likely as their white counterparts to believe their teachers support and care about their success” (Noguera, 2008, as quoted in Hirschfield, 2008, p. 92). The sociology of education tells us that dominant images such as black males being “bound for jail” and “unsalvageable,” (Hirschfield, 2008) can often lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, as students begin to perform a role that they view as preordained by their social realities and as told to them by their teachers. Students are known to modify the performance of their identities to fit the “script” teachers have for them (Ferguson, 2000; Noguera, 2008). In turn, students take this script projected from the teacher to perform roles imaged for adults in the world outside of school. To explain simply, teachers treat their current black students as their future adult selves, who will occupy a spot in a prison cell or who will become teenage parents on government assistance (Ferguson, 2000; Morris, 2007). These realities are often internalized by school staff and incorporated into the schools disciplinary process as early as fifth or sixth grade (Ferguson, 2000; Hirschfeld, 2008). To preempt arguments made by those who claim “these students” commit more behavioral infractions, Means (2013) argues “research…notes...racial bias in punishment is largely unreflective of behavioral differences across geographical and racial lines” (p. 31). This phenomenon becomes more pathetic when we discover the treatment of these youth is a general practice nationwide and not atypical, or isolated events in our society. (Kupchik and Ward, 2011; Noguera, 2008; Nolan, 2009, 2011; Wacquant, 2001). What experiences black boys and girls face appears to be common practice in inner city, public schools (Brown, 2005, 2015; Kupchik and Ward, 2011; Noguera, 2008; Nolan, 2009, 2011; Wacquant, 2001)..

School function as auxiliary penal institutions that seek to control black youth and place them as the lowest worker in society


Rose 2015, [E. (2015). Deathscapes in Neoliberal Times: Prisonfare, Workfare and Resistance as Potential Outcomes for Black Youth.//KHS]

In an economy, that becoming less able to provide its students with full time work, schools produce subjects that accept the conditions of a fragmented, unstable lower-class as criminalization and low-skilled labor becomes reality for black youth. If these students do not work they will accept their positions as a pre-determined life, one where authority expressed by punishment is to be exercised to its fullest, in the hopes that their potential for rebellion and resistance are repressed. My argument is as follows: as work becomes less of a possibility for black youth, the state under the specter of the empire will continuously deploy all of it power in all forms to ensure the function of capitalism and white supremacy. This is the proper response to advance marginality created by the roll back of the welfare state and the celebration of market fundamentalism by our lawmakers and ruling elites. Moreover, for the past three decades we have witnessed declining financial support for the education of children from minorities groups and low-income families which leaves more resources to be devoted to the children of those with more commanding roles in the economy (Vaught, 2011). Middle and upper class white families use their political influence to shift educational resources to their children and away from poor students of color on the notion that students who are redundant and disposable should not limited funds devoted to them (Vaught, 2011). In addition, Giroux’s (2006) disappointment in the determinism of the political-economy model of reproduction should be viewed as secondary to the everyday reality of black youth, who experience the strong arm of the neoliberal leviathan which erodes, snatches possibilities and encloses them in Orwellian like conditions. The question why urban schools are performing poverty control responsibilities in a neoliberal society was discussed in the first chapter. Consequently, massive amounts of bodies are simply now surplus in a service, globalized, technological economy where capital and jobs move with the push of a button. New markets are instantaneously created on laptops and mobile phones which a decade ago would have been unimaginable. We need to now reconsider theories of social reproduction in education to incorporate the penal functions of low-income minorities urban schools so one can illuminate the fact that while some schools “reproduce traditional social class hierarchies schools in low-income neighborhood of color now assist in the production of a criminalized class” (Nolan, 2009, p. 29). This supports Bowles and Gintis (2011) thesis that the reproduction of the class system is not perfect, absolute nor without its problems, because the reproduction process is often contradictory as the people who function it are too. For Nolan (2011) the upper half of the class and schooling ladder reproduction still produces similar social relationships, it’s the lower half that needs to be updated or replaced. Therefore, educational theorist and activist should not disregard the whole framework just to acknowledge that schools are now poverty storage warehouses for 21st century youth. The urban school now is “a kind of auxiliary penal institution in which some of the city’s most marginalized youth spent their days under heavy police surveillance” (Nolan, 2011, location in Kindle application 143). This is fundamentally different when “teachers and school administrators in a working-class school” (Bowles and Gintis 2011, p. 133) are forced into a “relationship that fairly closely mirrors that of the factory” (p. 133). The numbers and research around increasing prison rates and a declining manufacturing sector should cause alarm for those who are invested and passionate about public education and issues of race and equity. However, since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly settled in the economic, political, and ideological life of the United States and the transnational trafficking in U.S. commodities, culture, and ideas (Davis, 2003). The consequences of carceralization of all life is the rapid creation of these new penal institutions producing and reproducing criminal subjectivities as formal education centers remain the major conduits to prisons. To offer a counter argument, one that is grounded in the reality of the students who this paper is more interested in, the relationship between the urban public school and the prison system is not a simple one (just as the relationship between the class system and schools was not absolute or pre-determined), nor is there necessarily a direct path from one institution to the other, as the school–prison track or “pipeline” metaphor used by advocates suggests (Nolan, 2011). The school–prison track is a well- documented phenomenon, but what it looks like on the ground needs to be illuminated. Nolan (2011) argues that students do not generally go from school to prison based on one run- in with the law, in the school hallway. Instead, students are subjected to heavy policing in various domains of their lives— in the streets, on public transportation, and, in the case of hallways in large urban public schools. Nolan (2011) illustrates how indirect this path from school to prison is: As they accumulate summonses for minor violations of the law and school misbehavior, they ultimately miss court appearances, and warrants are then put out for their arrest. In some cases, students have another confrontation with police in school. At other times, they get caught up in low- level criminal activity on the street, and when it is discovered that they missed a court appearance (after receiving a summons in school), they spend time in jail. So although it is true that disproportionately high numbers of poor and working- class youth of color face prison sentences, it is equally important to note that many more are subjected to low- level forms of penal management without ever doing serious time behind bars (Location 338 in Kindle app). A direct pipeline between schools and prison does not exist even though the demographics of students who attend these low-performing public school and those who attend prison are similar. I would like to take time to rebut and shift the discussion on this phenomenon.\

Schools legitimize and reproduce social structures by creating the same disciplinary tactics that push black bodies into the penal system to produce cheap sources of labor—any discussion of the ‘working’ class must be centered around black subjectivity to problematize innerclass violence


Rose 2015, [E. (2015). Deathscapes in Neoliberal Times: Prisonfare, Workfare and Resistance as Potential Outcomes for Black Youth.//KHS]

If scholars continue to explore how schools legitimize and reproduce unequal social structures, then a new approach is needed to understand gender, race, and class. Reproduction theories are insufficient to explain how the schooling experiences of black youth in a punitive neoliberal post/de-industrialized world relate to the production of social, political, and economic inequality. The educational environment for low-income black youth now resembles a prison factory for the 21st century. Instead of producing working subjects who identify with an industrial capitalism, these students are being produced as criminals who strongly identify with the presence of a security, penal and military apparatus (Brown, 2005). There is a need for a framework that reveals how gender and race still operates in schools, creating negative effects for male and female alike. I would recommend using reproduction theory alongside theories of punishment (Garland, 1990; Nolan, 2009; Wacquant, 2001), crime and security (Simon, 2007), Intersectionality (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1991; Christensen and Jensen, 2012; hooks, 1981; Morris, 2007), structural theories of race (Bell, 1995; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Brown and De Lissovoy, 2011; Marable, 2000, 2002; Mills, 1997; Omi and Winant, 1994; Winant, 2000), and analysis of the new political economy and its impact in relation to the reconfiguration of the state, race, the urban city and advanced marginality (Brown, 2015; De Lissovoy, 2012; Fording, et al., 2011; Giroux, 2008, 2013; Goldberg, 2008; Lipman, 2011, 2013; Marable, 2000; Means, 2013; Saltman, 2014; Wacquant, 2009 ,2010,2012). This will allow us to shed light on the reproduction of material subordination in the form of race, class, and gender, through their infusion of the criminal justice system and their responsibility of crime and poverty control. At the macro- level policy, scholars can unpack the motivations and outcomes of these inequalities while situating them within a governing logic of capital and racial domination. This will allow us to see why and how particular groups of students are either afforded or denied access to highly cognitive curriculum and critical thinking skills, positive attitudes about their sense of self, real expectations and aspirations for their futures, and pro-social behaviors in society at large. The theoretical framework of reproduction theory in education is as valid today as it was in the past (Bowles and Gintis, 2011; Ferguson, 2000, Kupchik and Ward, 2011; MacLeod, 2009; Morris, 2007; Noguera, 2008; Nolan, 2009; Saltman, 2014, 2015; Wacquant, 2001). Bowles and Gintis, following Marx provided us, as critical scholars in education, with a powerful tool for unearthing the dominant ideology of class and social inequality in our society. The reason why it is important is that it centers the political economy in the logic of reproduction. In this chapter, I argued that schools are still important as sites for the reproduction of social inequality. Although the class structure is not as clearly defined as it was in the past and students employment possibilities are not necessarily aligned to linking to one's class position, the reproduction of the middle and upper-classes still rings true. What do we do with one of the most used theories to explain social inequality in education and within our society at large? We must critically analyze large urban public schools and the forms their behaviors, and actions at the micro-level to get at the logic of their operations. Bowles and Gintis (2011) wrote that for the blacks and other minorities, their schooling conditions them for their possibility of occupying a permanent position in the underclass in our economic structure. But blacks did work in factories as was argued earlier and they suffered the most, as most of these jobs were located in the center urban core where de/post-industrialization had the most severe impacts for inner-city life, thus creating large pockets of concentrated poverty and a black underclass (Wilson, 1987, 1996). Moreover, theories about reproduction centered the experiences of white working-class youth (Bowles and Gintis, 2011; Willis, 1981). I spent substantial time arguing for the decentering of white males from the universal “working-class” subject. Moreover, I argued that their move to the margins should be replaced with a group of people who are the least likely to reinforce the exclusion of different voices. The white working-class youth are not walking into factories as they did in the past. For the future of reproduction theory in education, the incorporation of the prison techniques can be used as a way to illustrate how low-income schools perform poverty control in a neoliberal economy. With much nuance, not every student who does encounter the law or the police in their youth will end up behind bars. What we should be most concerned about is the types of subjectivities that are now being shaped in our nation's public schools. For it to fail, we will have to produce a new society where wealth is equally distributed among all races and classes, and where one’s background paid very little in terms of what occupation you will perform in the future. We must take theory to inform our actions and inform our actions with good theory. Social reproduction theory is a key first step for it tells us what we need to know now. What we need next is what we need to know in the future. In sum, hopefully this future is not too utopian and far removed from our present, as our very own existence depends on it.

Black youth are Where black life is rendered precarious life—we need an analysis of race to deconstruct antiblackness at the level of civil society


Rose 2015, [E. (2015). Deathscapes in Neoliberal Times: Prisonfare, Workfare and Resistance as Potential Outcomes for Black Youth.//KHS]

This chapter is important as it acknowledges reproduction theories and its various explanations have been invaluable in contributing to a broader understanding of the political nature of schooling and its relation to the dominant society (Giroux, 2006). Moreover, Giroux stressed that this theory “has not achieved its promise to provide a comprehensive critical science of schooling” (Giroux, 2006, p. 3). For Giroux (2006) his main criticism of reproduction theories lies in the “over-emphasis[ing] the idea of domination in their analysis,” (p.4) and “continually patterned themselves after structural-functionalist version of Marxism,” (p.4) which stresses that history is made behind the backs of the members of society. Giroux (2006) argues that the idea that people do make history has been neglected, while human subjects “disappear amidst a theory that leaves no room for ...mediation and resistance (p. 5). While I agree with Giroux that previous reproduction theories frame schools as factories or prisons and the actors in these institution as pawns, I disagree that this is one of the current weaknesses of reproduction theories in education. In fact, this is a realist account of how urban schools perform and function in an anti-black racist capitalist society (Fasching-Varner et al., 2014). As argued in the previous chapter, schools for low-income youth of color do act, perform and behave like factories and prisons, maybe not for working and middle-class white students, but ethnographic research and empirical data proves for poor black youth attending low-income urban schools this is the case (Kupchik and Ward, 2011; Nolan, 2011). However, taking a structural framework (See Bowles and Gintis, 2011), which is grounded in a race-class conflict approach between, blacks and whites (Bell, 1995, 2005; Brown and De Lissovoy, 2011; Marable, 2000), and the black experience (Bell, 1995, 2005; Sithole, 2014), I believe these theories have some merit. For once, we are able to shed light on the subtle and invisible ways necropower is deployed at black people, therefore making an “Orwellian fantasy” using the words of Giroux (2006) sound not-so extreme at all. Especially when schools, as described by Means (2013), resemble something out of George Orwell’s 1984;On entering the school, one is greeted by uniformed security guards, armed police in bulletproof vest, airport style x-ray screeners, scanning wands, and metal detectors. Inside the school, metal cages on the windows, steel cages over the doors” (pp. 59-60). Moreover, while this paper discuss the actions and choices of students and as a believer in student agency and resistance, I nonetheless agree with Ferguson’s (2000) conclusion of the structure vs. agency debate: I have found it rewarding to utilize both approaches to demonstrate the interplay between the effects of social structure and the creative response of individuals in everyday life that reproduces a status quo, but that sometimes produce change...My conviction is however that the balance tilts heavily in favor of determinants (p.22). For this reason I will argue that: 1) Central to the economic-reproductive position is the notion that schools can only be understood while analyzing the structural effects of the work place and linked to the correspondence principle developed by Bowles and Gintis. Moreover, the position I take in this thesis, is there is a relationship between domination, schooling the economy and power, 2) economic-reproductive social reproduction theories are not relevant in their current form as new configurations of our economics of race in the past three decades have made pure forms of social reproduction theory in application to the lives of poor black youth irrelevant, 3) in agreement with Saltman (2014), reproduction theories must be “selectivity revived” as it now accounts for the ways in which a two-tier education system is emerging, 4) race must be centered into the discussion of reproduction theories and Marxism while decentering the white male working-class subject from urban inequality, advanced marginality and urban education, 5) the new production of youth is not as workers but as criminals. Factory like schools pre-1970s are now manufacturing/producing criminal subjectivities as the penal apparatus now looms over poor youth of color existence for racial and economic domestication and cohesion, 6) with modifications of social reproduction theory, this framework can address material and subjective changes in the lives of urban youth. In order to better frame social reproduction, an overview and explanation of the economic-reproductive model of social reproduction will be discussed next as this lens set the foundation in most debates (Giroux, 2006).

The privatization of public and penal policy allows for the creation of the hyperghetto where neoliberal corporations profit off of the crime of poor youth through surveillance—this is used as a tactic to maintain racial and class lines


Rose 2015, [E. (2015). Deathscapes in Neoliberal Times: Prisonfare, Workfare and Resistance as Potential Outcomes for Black Youth.//KHS]

In this paper, I attempted to reconfigure academic scholarship in an attempt to place macro government policies central to the reconfiguration of urban schools behavior and their practices under the theatrical frameworks of neoliberal-paternalism, and racial structural formation. I argued that the creation and maintenance of life eradication on black subjects occurs to manufacture criminal and therefore disposable populations, as a result these, students are hailed by the state to participate in the low-wage labor market or the prison to reproduce existing social relationships among humans. Moreover, I grappled with the concept that social policies under neoliberalism are disciplining unstable fractions of the black working class exposed to all manners of insecurity, aggravated by the state. The punitive neoliberal state directed exclusively towards the precariat and sub- proletariat populations (in particular black people) in our society played a pivotal role in the retrenchment of social protection but to the spatial production and the distribution of urban precariat as well (Wacquant, 2014). In the daily interactions with the state, education for poor and precarious black youth serves the function of poverty control in the neoliberal city defined exclusively not only as market conditioning practice but racial stigmatization and containment as well (Wacquant, 2014). Next, one should see in depth the permutation of social policy and penal policy that as a custom were kept separate, now these two coupled, aimed at the same populations (destabilized black, white and Latino wage laborer created by government retrenchment, market de-regulation, liberalization, privatization and a shift in the production process) deploy the same techniques (surveillance, panoptic disciplinary objectives) (Wacquant, 2014). The schooling process of black youth par excellence illustrates the meshing of the social and penal policy in the United States as the resurgence of the prison and the protective disciplining practices of the welfare and education (workfare and edufare respectfully) is not a response to criminal insecurity as argued by Simon (2007) but to the social insecurity created by unstable, unpredictable loose wage labor and racial anxiety generated by the destabilization and crumbling of previous institutions that formed capital and ethnic formation domination (Wacquant, , 2009, 2009a, 2010, 2010a, 2012, 2013a). This is a corrective of the collapse of the black ghetto in the United States (see Wacquant, 2001, 2001a, 2002, 2002a). Fourth, these macro reconfigurations in state policy influence schools that serve black youth by enacting penal security applications to function as poverty management (education is a form of welfare and social policy), as the factory is no longer needed to produce more laborers. Like Wacquant’s structural analysis of the hyperghetto and the prison, schools perform the same responsibility as both an institution that is created by race and that creates race. 24 There were plenty of analytical tools deployed in this paper to analyze, diagnose, and conceptualize social phenomena. As such, I defined and unpacked Wacquant’s concepts of workfare and prisonfare, this was juxtaposed with Sithole’s (2014) concept of deathscapes and his appropriation of Mbembe (2003) necropolitics, and Agamben (2005) state of exception coupled with a discussion of the ontological, epistemic and existential consequences of structural racial violence, as it relates to neoliberalism and outcomes for poor youth of color in a post welfare society. The consequence of the change in economics and market ideologies was argued as a stable system of governance that functions with the morphing reality of race and is fused with decade old state policies that control, constraint and repress black populations (Wacquant, 2002, 2009; Winant and Omi, 1994).


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